Three obsessions about the job
Photo: Ankher, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
Like many folks in the internet biz, I get a little obsessive about charting progress, and about the pace of change, and about relations between traditional and new media, and about the ethics of digital journalism, and about the status of the technology, and about the rules of the road. This has been a great week to obsess.
Here are three “for instances.”
What will it mean if the FCC adopts proposed rules that will allow the really big players on the internet like Netflix and Google to buy preferential service from internet providers–a so-called fast lane? Does that put me and NCPR in the slow lane? Or does it just mean that when I pay for a Netflix subscription, I can rely on it to actually deliver smooth HD video? Will costs go up as a result? A case could be made that they could also go down–but I’ve never seen that happen before. Will it stifle start-ups? Many say yes.
We can almost certainly do this whole internet thing better. The U.S. in ranked number 31 in the world for speed and reliability of internet services. So, obsession number one–net neutrality.
Bill Haenel shared an article from American Journalism Review about the changing roles of copy editors. No–keep your eyes open! There is a big divide opening up in digital journalism on the importance of, or even the need for, copy editing. I come from a print background originally. As a printer and publication designer, I have personally reprinted 5,000 copies of a color brochure at my own expense over a misplaced comma. And many people, particularly coming from the newspaper side of digital news insist on the importance of having anything written for publication go through at least one editor first. Many digital operations, NCPR included, are doing editing after the fact–that is–getting the story up fast in the interests of news, and sweating the commas and typos later.
As an old-school English major, it makes me deeply uneasy. Should I now feel better because it is a “thing” and has a name? They’re calling it “back-editing.” Just as long as they aren’t going in for “back-fact-checking,” too. Obsession number two–how good is good enough?
Another “thing” these days is data-driven journalism. Having data sounds pretty good. One would want that in the toolkit. But an example passed across my desktop this week that made me go “huh.” It was a volunteered article submission titled “Saint Lawrence County Food Stamp Use Increases.” Well-written if a little stiff, informative, with data sources identified. Cool beans–except something seemed a little off. For one thing–who spells out the Saint in St. Lawrence County? Having an idle moment, I Googled the authors and found a huge number of articles all having the same title and identical text in the article, all except for the county names and the actual numbers. It had been published by news outlets all over the country.
Did the publishers know it wasn’t really “local” and just not care? Does it matter as long as the data is correct? Here is the version for Flathead County in Montana. Obsession number three–how can I tell who is a robot?
Hope you all have an obsession-free weekend–unless you enjoy your obsessions more than I do mine.
Tags: listeningpost
As a retired educator I, too, feel great angst everytime I read something that has a misplaced comma, misspelling etc. I do not like the idea of back-editing, it makes me cringe! I’ve heard interviews on NPR with professionals of all sorts that frequently make grammatical errors so even my favorite stations are not exempt.
Hi Bonnie–
I still cringe, too. But here’s the problem: the people who create the work that we publish are doing it at all hours and in a lot of places. Much of it is created for broadcast first, then for digital afterward. Often it is done overnight or in the early morning for broadcast at 8 am. Sometimes no written text exists for part or all of the broadcast piece. We not only don’t staff an editor 24/7, we don’t staff anyone 24/7. We’re too small.
But since digital is supposed to be even more timely than broadcast, we have to scramble to get ready for publication pages and pages each day of text. This would be a full-time job for a copy editor if we even had a full-time copy editor. NYT standards of copy editing are and will be beyond our reach.
So where is the sweet spot in between the competing demands of timeliness, accuracy and excellence? That’s the question all digital news operations large and small are grappling with–and yes–obsessing about.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
Ken Tingley, Post Star editor, wrote a column not long ago in which he discussed the difficulties of copy editing etc in the new media environment. I did a quick search for it but couldn’t find a link to post here. He gave a number for the word count they publish every day and even at a very low error rate they were likely to have something like 40-50 errors in print, if I remember correctly. The bottom line for him is the bottom line. There aren’t as many copy editors on staff as there once were, stuff slips through.
On air you’re dealing with the spoken word … fuggeddaboudit!
On line I try to write reasonably well but even when I’m doing fine my iPad can mess things up for me. I think the future will look much less regimented and more like Shakespeare who spelled his own name in many different ways.
That article you mention is an interesting use of “mail merge” technology. I wonder if they changed the title for counties whose food stamp use didn’t increase or just didn’t include those counties.
Many years ago (in college) I did photography for a chain of newspapers in the Hudson Valley. There were 4 newspapers in the chain but if you bought them all and compared them you found that only the outside sheet was different. The inside pages were all the same. A lo-tech merge?
Couldn’t resist the urge to tease a bit about something in this article about copy editing. One sentence begins with “The U.S. (in) ranked number 31…”. I also spent too many years in the printing business!
Hi Kevin–
You make a a perfect case in point. Until two weeks ago, “The Listening Post” was written on Thursday afternoon and was proofread by someone else before its 4 pm mailing. We switched to a Saturday morning email time, and yesterday I finished this up just before 5 pm, with no one else to look it over before I had to schedule the mailing. Nearly every time I publish something I have written where I have done the proofreading myself, I miss at least one error–usually an error of the kind that a spell checker won’t catch, either.
Even obsession is no substitute for another set of eyes on your work.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
There was an article in the Watertown Times this week that could have used some fact checking. It was on renewal of some fisheries legislation to protect certain species from overfishing. It said that restaurants in the “town” of Cape Cod in Massachusetts were serving Icelandic cod as opposed to Massachusetts cod. There are a lot of towns on Cape Cod, but to my knowledge none of them is named Cape Cod.
Kevin and Dale, don’t worry too much.
When I read “The U.S. in ranked number 31…,” my mind edited in to is without thinking about it or noticing it.
In verbal communication, we often translate mistakes into what we believe was meant, and become extremely agitated when some “nerd” insists on pointing out the error because we believe (often quite correctly) they just want to prove how smart they are and how dumb we are.
As an aside to data-driven journalism, I would like to point out how data can be as misleading as percentages. It is easy to make it appear as though you are comparing apples to apples when you are not.
This takes me back to the U.S. ranked number 31. The U.S. is a big country. We still have a lot of open space and it can be very expensive to provide high speed internet to large low population areas such as the Adirondacks.
As far as Netflix is concerned, I could say I couldn’t care less because I haven’t used and have no intention of using their product. I waste enough money as it is on satellite TV and the hundreds of offering it has.
Which brings me to my final point. We are spending a considerable amount of money for a lot of electronic junk. But stop and think for a moment. If you were to look at the cost of a daily newspaper, especial one like the NY Times, and consider what you actually bother to read in it, is there all that much difference between it and satellite TV? Whatever media you read, watch or hear, much is offered and very little is given much attention. Often one feels there is nothing to watch, nothing to read and nothing to listen to. But we pay for all we don’t bother with.